


Learn to Breathe

by RobotSquid



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Formication, Rape/Non-con References
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-20
Updated: 2012-06-20
Packaged: 2017-11-08 03:50:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/438832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RobotSquid/pseuds/RobotSquid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written in the "Primary Colors" universe.</p><p>The Dolorosa gets a visitor on Mindfang's ship.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Learn to Breathe

**Author's Note:**

> This work contains oblique references to non-con and also references to formication, otherwise known as the sensation of insects crawling under the skin.

The cup shakes when she tries to pick it up. She has learned to go slow with the pitcher, otherwise she will not survive the night without another broken finger. She takes a deep breath, feeling the air fill up her lungs, feels the slow burn as she holds it there, and then slowly lets it out. Her exhalation sends a strand of her bangs dancing in the air before her. She sets the cup and pitcher down for a moment and hastily pats her hair down. It kills her to feel how matted it has become, how sweaty and tangled and no matter how politely she asks, she will never get the brush she desires.

It is hardly a question of vanity. She just wants something to hold in her hands again that will not be taken from her. She would be able to pull the bristles through her hair, as slowly or quickly as she liked, and perhaps, for an instant, she would believe herself pretty again.

She remembers tiny, clumsy hands touching her hair, painfully but lovingly combing the soft strands.

She breathes in again, picks up the cup, and heads towards the sounds of laughter and raised voices.

\---

The Dolorosa does not sleep. The only thing resembling that comfort is when she is able to lie down in the cold, dusty respiteblock she shares with three other of Mindfang’s slaves, and she dozes. If the pirate wants her, the Dolorosa is awake in an instant. Mindfang wants her often.

Still, it is a blessed respite compared to her nights on Dualscar’s ship. Even now she trembles to recall that name. She scratches her legs and arms obsessively, until her nails break, because the sound of his name is like tiny insects crawling all over her body and into every open pore. She grits her teeth and scratches harder, letting out a slow, soft whine as she fights back tears. She never stops until the redblood slave grabs her hands and stares her hard in the eye, shaking her head until the Dolorosa breathes again.

The Dolorosa does not care for the redblood. She is sick, and she coughs up blood every day. The Dolorosa cannot stand the sight of her blood.

\---

Mindfang is drunk and has torn her most expensive coat. Or rather, Dualscar has torn it. Even though the Dolorosa has escaped his ship and his hands, she does not escape his presence. He sold her to his kismesis willingly, but their paths cross nearly every perigee. He is visiting now, in the throes of black flirtation as he gloats to Mindfang about how much he has sold a very expensive scimitar for, the very scimitar that he had promised to give as a gift earlier this sweep.

Mindfang is not pleased. Dualscar laughs. The Dolorosa stands rigidly against the wall, silent until she is called upon to refill cups, clear away dishes, whatever Mindfang asks for. The Dolorosa suspects that Mindfang calls her to be cupbearer only when Dualscar is present to torture her. She does not understand why. She has only ever tried to be obedient. But she is not stupid. She knows that her status as a traitor of the Empire does not net her any of the usual considerations.

The Dolorosa tries not to listen as they scream at each other. She recoils as a handheld mirror hits the wall, inches from Dualscar’s smug, laughing face. Mindfang slaps him, her perfectly sharpened nails dragging violet blood across his face. He only turns back to face her, grinning and flitting out his disgusting seatroll tongue to lap up the rivulets of blood that are by now reaching his chin….

The Dolorosa stiffens, attempting to make herself smaller, and bites back a whimper. She does not want to be here. She is going to be sick. If she retches on Mindfang’s floor she will be beaten for sure and possibly lose another finger.

Dualscar has pulled off Mindfang’s coat and is kissing her, his lips tight and possessive as a lamprey. “If you’re so concerned about this piece of trash,” he says, kicking at the discarded coat on the floor, “give it to that one.” He jerks his head in the direction of the Dolorosa and she immediately drops to her knees, terrified. “She knows her way around a needle. Don’t you, little jadeblood?”

 _Breathe. Breathe. Just let the air sit in your chest, feel it, let it out, let it out…._ She scratches her arms again.

“I asked you a question,” Dualscar barks, and the Dolorosa feels tears beginning to fall from her eyes. She curls into a ball and tries to hold back the whimpers but it doesn’t work.

“We _were_ in the middle of a discussion,” Mindfang growls, grabbing his chin and turning his face back towards her.

“No wonder your things are falling apart, Mindfang,” Dualscar responds, laughing. “Cheap clothes, disobedient slaves, haven’t made any money in perigees…you should really just cut your losses and come to the ship with me.”

“Oh, you’re desperate now, are you? Did you run out of trolls to fuck on your ship?”

The Dolorosa is unable to hold back her sob. In an instant their attention is on her. She chances to look up and sees Dualscar coming towards her, and her heart stops.

She hears rattling chains, feels a searing, cutting pain in her wrists, and she screams.

“For fuck’s sake, Dualscar!” Mindfang shouts, running over and punching him out of the way. “I told you to leave her the fuck alone!”

The Dolorosa feels arms around her and cannot tell whose they are. She thrashes, pushing the intruder away, the insects crawling and multiplying by the thousands and turning her entire body into a hell she no longer wants to inhabit.

“Hey, hush,” comes Mindfang’s voice, close to her ear. It is not Dualscar…it does not feel or sound or smell like Dualscar, and the Dolorosa relaxes ever so slightly. “Look at me. Dammit, do what I say, look at me.”

The Dolorosa blinks and raises her face to obey. Mindfang takes gentle hold of her chin and stares at her, her cerulean blue eyes rock-steady and real. “You’re okay,” Mindfang says. It is a declaration. She speaks the truth. This is her ship, and everything that she wishes will be so.

The Dolorosa suddenly feels very tired, and she nods slightly.

Mindfang reaches for her torn coat and sets it in the Dolorosa’s lap. “Go fix that,” she says, helping the slave to her feet. “No need to return until tomorrow.”

It takes a moment for her to realize what is happening. She clutches the coat tight to her chest and bows her head. “Th-thank you…thank you,” she stammers. Mindfang waves her away and she hastily leaves the room.

\---

If filling pitchers is difficult, threading needles is impossible. The Dolorosa’s fingers are burning the instant she picks a spool of thread. It is too hard to see the eye of a needle through clouded vision. She puts everything down and wipes her eyes, then continues. Her hands are shaking too badly. Her broken fingers are killing her. Oh what she would give for a moment of rest, for somebody to bring her something warm; everything is cold here. All she wants is a blanket, tea, soup, the touch of a loved one….

She stiffens and swallows down the lump in her throat. What use did she ever have for loved ones? People that she only ended up letting down in every way. People she made the most sacred promise to, a promise to love and protect that she broke.

There’s no use in handing out love to anybody. Love is nothing but a weapon, one forged by your own hand, sharpened and honed and then given away to the first person who’ll plunge it into your chest.

Love is too powerful. It’s too dangerous. The Dolorosa knows that now, now when it was far too late. She would lock away her capacity to love for the rest of her life, even though there is nothing left of her to tear apart.

She feels the skirt of her ugly dress shift. She pauses and looks below the table. There is nobody—nothing there.

She breathes in, and she finally manages to thread the needle.

\---

She is not done with the coat the next night or the night after. She hopes that by avoiding Mindfang she will avoid trouble. Nobody comes to the room to ask after her or see about the progress of the repairs.

The ship has grown quiet. She wonders if perhaps they have made port somewhere and all of the trolls are gone. It would not bother her if that were the case. She knows that sometimes the slaves try to run away when they are docked. She does not know where they will go. She certainly has nowhere.

The Dolorosa stays in her room and sews and sews and sews and breaks thread and rethreads her needles and massages her broken joints and repeats, repeats, repeats.

She hears footsteps out in the hall. Somebody is opening doors, but they never come to hers. She is okay with it.

\---

_”Rosa?”_

She is crying.

_”I’m sorry, love…I’m so sorry, hush, hush now….”_

She wakes up and finds red blood pouring out of the coat, and she panics. She grabs for her needle and thread but she can’t thread it fast enough and the blood is running faster, already coagulating over her hands as she tries to sew up the broken seam but she is not fast enough. Her thread breaks, her needle bends, and all the while a child is crying.

 _”FUCK ALL OF YOU! FUCK! FUUUUUUUUUUCK!”_ The phantom scream rips through the room and breaks out the window.

She tosses the coat away in horror and watches the red blood seep out in a puddle. She buries her face in her pile of rags and wishes that the whole world were gone.

\---

She thinks she has finished the coat now. She doesn’t really know where it is, but she is sewing together something, and that is what she was ordered to do, isn’t it? The Dolorosa doesn’t ask questions. She hasn’t for a very, very long time. She wonders when she will run out of thread and which piece of clothing she will pull apart to get more.

Her door opens. Somebody walks inside. It is probably a new slave, or the redblood come back from cleaning the deck. She doesn’t look up. The Dolorosa doesn’t care about new slaves or old slaves or anybody else. She just wants to be finished with her task. She just wants to put something back together.

Whoever is in the room has come too close to her. She stiffens up, stops her work and cautiously turns her head to see who it is. A fully grown troll she does not know has knelt down beside her. His eyes are gray.

“…Rosa?” he asks.

The child starts crying again, from somewhere unseen. Her hands begin to shake so bad that she drops her needle, and it rolls between the floorboards and is gone forever.

For a long while the two just stare at each other. The Dolorosa feels a tight pain in her heart, like a twisting knife, and she gently touches her chest to ensure that it is intact.

“…A-are…are you here for the coat?” she asks, her voice small.

The troll looks a bit surprised. “Um….”

“B-because it’s…I haven’t finished yet, I….” She turns away and begins to dig through the pile of rags. The coat _should_ be here, and it should be easy to find, it’s bright blue after all, how could she be so stupid to _lose_ it….

The stranger touches her arm, and she jumps, recoiling and turning to face him. She pushes herself up against the wall. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I’m sorry, I haven’t lost it, let me just find it….”

“It’s okay, Rosa,” he says. Why does he call her by that name? The Dolorosa hates that name. That’s what Dualscar calls her when he is touching her. He always says it so hatefully.

The stranger puts his other hand on her shoulder, and she trembles violently. “P-please,” she begs. “Please, let me try to find it. Please don’t tell them that I lost it.”

“Rosa, do you not know…?”

He moves closer still, and it is too much. She screams and can no longer hold in her crying. “Please, please,” she says, tears pouring down her face. “Please don’t touch me, please, please go away.”

The stranger lets go of her, and the look on his face almost makes her want to stop crying, because the expression he wears is what she too feels in her heart every day. He shuffles backward, stares at her, and has nothing at all to say.

\---

She cannot find the coat again. She fashions a needle out of a wood splinter and tries, repeatedly, to continue sewing the rags together. The wood is a terrible needle. It shreds the fabric and puts splinters in her fingers. It is just another pain to focus on. It doesn’t bother her much.

The stranger doesn’t leave her room. She wants him to, but every time she speaks to him she only feels like crying. He sits on the other side of the room up against the wall, watching her every move. He looks as though he has not stopped walking for a very, very long time.

When the Dolorosa grows tired of sewing, she lays down and tries to sleep. She keeps an ear out for Mindfang’s voice, but it never comes.

\---

She hears screaming in her dreams, and when she wakes up it is her own cry that has roused her. She looks down at her hands and legs and they are covered in violet. She screams again, and immediately the stranger is there, his arms around her, holding her safe, holding her steady and anchoring her to him.

He smells like metal and fire.

\---

_”I truly don’t know how you manage it. This is the third time you’ve ripped this shirt, and no matter how tightly I hem it up again, you find some way to tear it.”_

_“It’s just an accident.” He grins at her and clumsily pulls the shirt off so she can repair it once more._

_His body is covered in bruises and cuts. His bright red blood is flowing for all the world to see._

_“Carmine!” she shouts. “What is all this?!”_

_“Hmm? Oh! I was climbing a tree. It was so big and pretty, Rosa!” He raises his arms up to show her how tall. “I thought if I went all the way up to the top, I would be able to see forever. The whole planet, maybe! …But right before I got to the top, I stepped on a wrong branch and I fell, aaaaall the way down.” He brings his right hand slowly down towards the floor to show her how far he had fallen. He giggled. “It_ hurt, _Rosa.”_

_“What have I told you about climbing trees?” She is weary now._

_“You said it’s dangerous and to only do little ones.” He crosses his arms and pouts. “But little ones are boring and you can’t see anything from the top. One day I’m going to climb the biggest tree of all, and you’ll be really proud of me then, Rosa.”_

_She smiles and leans forward to plant a kiss on his forehead. “I’m already proud of you, love. Not many trolls would go back up after a fall like that.”_

\---

The Dolorosa’s eyes open slowly. She is staring up at the ceiling, and it is the height of the day. Dust specks are floating in the rays of light that pour in through the window.

“…Carmine,” she whispers. Her eyes close again.

\---

“Whose coat are you fixing?” the stranger asks her.

“It is Mindfang’s coat,” she replies. But the coat is long gone. She doesn’t care about it anymore.

“Who is that?”

“…My mistress. A pirate. Do you not know you are on her ship?” She turns to glare at him, but he only grins. He has a very childlike smile. She wants more than anything in the world to adore that smile but she cannot.

“Well, I don’t think anyone else is here,” he replies. “You’re the only one who can really tell me where this is.”

“I’ve told you, then. Why are you even here? Are you a new slave of hers?”

“No.” He shakes his head, and his eyes grow hardened. His face is all seriousness when he tells her, “I am nobody’s slave.”

She wants to love that about him too. She cannot. So she only smiles and nods. “You are a noble one. It’s too bad that idealism is long dead.”

“Says who?”

She pauses and stares down at the rags in her lap. She realizes that she has not been sewing with thread for a while. She finds that she doesn’t care much. “Have you seen the state of the world today, stranger?”

“Not as much as you have, I’m sure.”

“Then you must believe me when I tell you that certain things have no place here. You can’t expect flowers to grow in salted earth. You can’t have idealism and hope in a place like this.”

“…That’s not what you used to say.”

She smiles grimly. “I know better now.”

There is a silence. The Dolorosa stops sewing, because she has finally, finally grown tired of it. She sets the wooden needle aside and looks at her handiwork. She has sewn together every piece of rag in the room. What she has made is ugly and dirty and can be of no use to anybody, not even as the most modest blanket.

“Is it done?” the stranger asks, standing up and approaching carefully. She lets him come closer.

“Oh…” he says, beholding the monstrosity. He picks up a corner in one hand and inspects it. “This isn’t nearly your best work.”

“It is all I can do.” She wipes her eyes with broken fingers.

“…You know, you might think this is weird, but when I was growing up, I had another troll as my lusus.”

She laughs humorlessly. More tears fall on her face. “I had a tiny upstart grub that I looked after in my youth.”

“…So you know that, but you still don’t remember who I am?”

The smile falls off the Dolorosa’s face. She looks at the mass of sewn-together rags and remembers the feel of seatroll skin against hers and the scars she has scratched into her arms. Her lips, pursed together tightly, begin to tremble.

“Do you know where you are yet?” the stranger asks. He comes closer to her and for once she does not feel threatened. She no longer wants him to leave, because when he is next to her everything is okay. For once, everything is okay.

“I….” She hiccups once, holding back her sobs, and cannot speak further.

“You can make so much more than this ugly thing,” he tells her. “Why are you punishing yourself down here? You’ve never done a single thing wrong in your entire life.”

“I let him die,” she says.

“Who?”

“I let you die.”

“Rosa, no. No, it wasn’t you. I don’t blame you for an instant of it.”

“As soon as I saw you…lying there in the crater, so tiny and…I knew that if you lived, your life would never be what you deserved. But I couldn’t leave you there…I saw you…and it was my fault for loving you.”

She turns to look at him, and to her surprise, he is smiling. His gray eyes are turning color, glowing a bright, vibrant red, and it is the most beautiful color she has ever seen. She reaches out and touches his cheek, softly, runs her thumb over the scar where he fell when he was a child, and then raises her other hands to runs her fingers through his hair. She touches the nubby horns that never grew as long as he wanted, she feels the rough texture of the hair that was always trimmed crookedly because he never really learned to sit still.

He only smiles wider and makes no move to stop her. She reaches for his hands, his strong hands that looked like they could easily crush a skull but in reality were so soft and never hurt a single living creature. Holding his hands in hers, they feel warm. He tightens his grip on her slightly, and she feels the unyielding grasp of a child’s tiny fingers. Holding on like there is nothing else in the world as he learns to walk.

_”I’ll hold you, love. Just take a step, I promise I won’t let you fall.”_

“Carmine,” she says, and the tears burst out as she leans forward into his embrace. She cries and cries and cries, more than she has done since she herself was a wriggler, and there is no shame. Carmine, her Carmine, holds her and rubs her back and kisses her head and tells her that he loves her, he loves her.

“Carmine, take me home,” she sobs. “Please, love, take me home….”

\---

She does not know how long she has been dead. She can only guess that it happened as she was sewing up Mindfang’s coat. It does not truly matter, and she is grateful that at the very least she does not remember the pain of it.

She doubts that the actual dying was painful at all. There is nothing they could have done to her that she would not have welcomed with open arms.

By the time Carmine leads her back to the hive, the dreambubble containing Mindfang’s ship has gone away. They sit on the front porch together, watching the stars shift and change all above them. She is tired, so tired, and she rests her shoulder on his, lets him hold her up.

She breathes in, holds the air in her lungs and gently lets it out. It is a sigh of contentment.


End file.
